This one was particularly special as we successfully reached out to new people - in this case refugees. We got invited by Neue Nachbarschaft Moabit, a community initiative for bringing together newcomers and locals, to do the workshop at their wonderful café. We were happy to have a diverse group of learners, coaches and organizers, half of them members of the Neue Nachbarschaft community.

Our regular Rust Berlin Hack and Learn meetup has now officially joined the OpenTechSchool umbrella. We meet biweekly and learn the new programming language created by Mozilla. The Rust Hack and Learn is coached by Florian Gilcher, member of the global Rust community team, Johann Hofman, founder of the group and Florian Hartwig.

We make this move because we wanted to join an organisation that supports us in our goals and provides a helpful framework. OpenTechSchool runs many events with a similar concept and promotes them, which allows us to be more effective in our outreach by doing it together with other language communities that share our goals and values. This includes our community diversity goals.

Finally, many of us come from other language communities and see a lot of value in collaborating instead of telling juvenile jokes about each other.

The Rust Berlin meetup will still continue to exist and will host the irregular meetups with talks and other projects.

Sign up now for the monthly OpenTechSchool global newsletter to keep up with
all the new developments such as new material and formats, up and coming
chapters, or exciting events.

Subscribe to our newsletter

OpenTechSchool is a global initiative, spread throughout countries, continents,
and timezones. With our blueprints and Discourse platform we have
always been trying to connect our distributed membership. Up until now, there
has been no good way to just stay informed with all that’s new in
OpenTechSchool.

We are introducing our monthly newsletter as a means to keep up with what your
fellow friends in other chapters are doing.

It is scheduled for the 20th each month, as to include the contents of the
latest Community Call (which takes places around the 15th each month.) If
you have exciting content to share with the community at large, please approach
us at team.newsletter@opentechschool.org.

What a beautiful summer this is. I think we all deserve some blue sky after
last weeks ehhh-kinda weather. So I’ll not keep you from spending your time
outside too long and get right to the point.

As you might have heard our friends from the Dortmund chapter are hosting
the very first OTSConf there this summer.

On August 15th they will host talks ranging from an introduction to
Evolutionary Algorithms, over queuing protocols and functional programming
to diversity and women in Open Source. And as if that wasn’t enough, the next
days follows – in good old OTS tradition – a day of workshops and hands-on
learning. It’s gonna be fab.

But this wouldn’t be OpenTechSchool, if there wasn’t an extra effort taken to
ensure diversity and inclusion beyond what is usual. The conference comes with
a clear code of conduct (which also sponsors have to sign), they are hosted in
completely accessible venue with a guidance system for visually impaired, have
vegetarian and vegan meal options, offer student tickets, community and
diversity tickets and a discount for members of the OTS Foundation. On
top, if you need someone to look after your kid(s) during the conference,
there will be child care (ping them).

If you have any other questions, you can reach the organising team of the
conference directly on slack.

OpenTechSchool, through the Hackership Team, once again pushes for a more open and accessible society for all, advanced through programming and hacking: together with the Google Developer Group Gran Canaria, Incube, the Department of Engineering of the Univesity of Las Palmas and in collaboration with the local Goverment, we are organising an OpenData Hackathon on February 28th, 2015.

2013. The first full-year after it all began in April of 2012. And what a year it has been – a truly great one for OpenTechSchool. Let’s take a short look back on what has happened this year and a small peak into the future at what is yet to come – which promises to be at least as exciting, if not more so.

OTS Hamburg has created a new workshop: Github from Scratch. On November 30th 2013 the workshop Github from Scratch was organized in Hamburg. 35 Learners and Coaches attended, learned together and had lots of fun.

Last month Angus from OTS Melbourne travelled to Auckland, New Zealand for Kiwi PyCon. He gave a talk entitled Encouraging New Programmers: The OpenTechSchool Model, and also organised a free workshop Introduction to Data Processing with Python.

We’ve already talked about us investigating on in-depth programmes before, but now it is official: The OpenTechSchool in Berlin will offer a full-time learning Programme called Hackership. Similar to the programme the Hacker School in New York is running, Hackership is a 4-days-per-week self-directed peer-learning programme going for several weeks to become a better programmer.

We are very happy to welcome three more local teams to the global OpenTechSchool Community: Tel-Aviv and Ramallah - both in the middle east and Dortmund in lovely Ruhrgebiet, so far the farthest west (in Germany).

The Social Coding with Git workshop has been popular in Berlin and Sweden. Yesterday Melburnians got a chance to get acquanted with Git & GitHub, and share their contributions to the ‘Global Underground’ network of bars and cafes.

The great thing about running a non-profit organization with a lot of dedicated volunteers supported by companies and co-working spaces is that there’s usually little money needed. But we don’t kid ourselves that there is a need for a solid financial basis. That is the reason why we created the foundation under German law and allowed supporters to become a member or give donations.

Once we announced this possibility we received requests for electronic payments - even from as far as New York, USA. We started looking for solutions and one that quickly came to mind was PayPal. We asked PayPal if they are willing to accept us in their non-profit program and they made us an offer we couldn’t decline.

So, we are happy to present you the zero-fee PayPal donate button for OpenTechSchool:

The great thing about this magic button: It accepts any amount in any (supported) currency! Try it out!

We are very thankful to the PayPal team for solving our problem so quickly and especially to Tim who made it all happen!

The OpenTechSchool has built incredible things over the last year and every time when we add that it is all volunteer work, people are completely speechless. The things accomplished indeed are amazing and we are very proud of it but that doesn’t mean we don’t need any help; that couldn’t be further from the truth. Not only are we always open for more ideas and projects, we are also constantly looking for people to help us implement and execute the tasks we already have on our hands.

Great things are happening in Hamburg: Last week we had the first “App Summer Camp”. Twelve girls aged 13 to 15 learned how to develop Android Apps on their own. But they did not only learn programming. They also learned how to pitch and present their results to an audience. Another important part of the four day workshop was to meet female rolemodels who work as software engineers and mobile app developers.

Since I joined the group of AfricaHackTrip – developers and designers from Europe visting tech hubs in East Africa this fall – I learned about many great initiatives in this area, some of them being a perfect fit for my involvement in OpenTechSchool.

I’d like to draw your attention to a special project: Nairobi Dev School. Martha Chumo, a 19 year-old girl, is building a school to teach coding, particularly encouraging women to participate and offering financial support to those who need it. She’s currently running a campaign on Indiegogo to be able to rent a place, buy furniture and laptops. Here’s another article. Also check out her blog.

Apart from that there’s also Rails Girls going on and a lot of other things. Take a look at the blog Girl Geek Kampala to get an impression about what is going on in Uganda’s capital. I’m looking forward to meet some of the protagonists in person.

Seems as if OpenTechSchool and AfricaHackTrip share some values and could benefit from each other. I’m looking into ways how these projects can promote each other more. Maybe there will be chapters in African cities soon? Leave a comment if you have ideas.

Our first OpenTechSchool event in Hamburg at the Hanse Ventures office was great: Sixteen women with different backgrounds (business, teaching, design, social work, computer science,…) and more, less or no experience in programming met to learn together and teach each other. The goal: Developing own apps!

Melbourne

Melbourne premiered the Introduction to Data Processing with Python workshop in the wonderful Electron Workshop this time around. An interesting twist: They conducted the event in a split fashion, with learners picking from either the new data processing material or the beginners course. One learner commented, “the material was excellent, so were the helpers.” Plus, they had cookies.

Zurich

Zurich had its first OpenTechSchool workshop ever, the time-tested Python for beginners. The Colab café served as a great location on that sunny Saturday. Participants and coaches alike were eager to have more workshops in the future: “Good coaches, cool location. Looking forward to the next opentechschool workshop!” And it was one of the few Zurich events which actually could get hold of a few bottles of Club Mate.

Tel Aviv

Tel Aviv has been jumpstarted by our great core member, Ben, in just about a week. The city in Isreal, our first chapter in Asia, kicked off with an Introduction to programming with Python. “I wish I could learn this way every weekend,” one participant commented.

In April we introduced a new Learners Meetup format and we’re really happy how things are developing.
The Learners Meetup in a way is the essence of what OpenTechSchool is about: people from all backgrounds and experience levels, especially absolute beginners, are coming together to learn and talk about technology. We are creating a community out of learners and coaches, novices and experts of all fields and interests.
The barcamp-style part of the event we started in May turned out to be a great way to get people to talk to others about topics they’re interested in. Small groups of two to eight participants that share the same interests including at least one expert get together. After 15 to 20 minutes one person per group summarizes for everybody what the group was talking about. Everyone gets involved that way and talking usually continues after the official ending.

Prior to this announcement we wracked our brains and discussed a lot. But since creating a longer, more in-depth learning programm would be our biggest project so far, we really want your input now. After all, a project of this size means much more responsibilities and day-to-day work than one of our weekend workshops.

As always we care most about the learning experience of our participants so we want to make it right from the start. If you’d be interested in participating in such a programme, you can help us succeed by taking six minutes of your time and answer this short learners survey.

Thank you for helping us figure out how to make tech education better!

We were initally planning to co-host our talk with a few other tech learning inititatives at this years Codemotion in Berlin, but when we learnt they were unable to participate, we had to restructure our talk and the topics to talk about. Though a little shy first, we decided to take this opportunity and, after talking about the lastest developments in the tech education space and presenting the OpenTechSchool and what we do, talked about something we’ve been pondering about for a while: How to make sure learning becomes an on-going process and take a peak into the future plans of the OpenTechSchool.

When we started the OpenTechSchool movement about a year ago, we established a few core values we follow. Alongside of that we also promised ourself to “document everything” to make it the easiest for others to copy the concept and get their own education efforts off the ground the most efficiently possible. This is of course an unachievable ideal but we are sure todays launch of the ask.OpenTechSchool knowledge base brings us a hell lot closer.

After the successful launch of OpenTechSchool Australia, we are very happy to announce another two local teams joining the always extending OpenTechSchool movement: Hamburg and Zurich. And not only are the kick-off events already set up, no the first workshops and events are on schedule in those cities already, too.

OpenTechSchool will be a part of the first annual Codemotion Berlin tech conference May 9-11. The entire conference takes place over the course of three days– one day of workshops (Wearables/Arduino/GLSL Shaders etc.) and two days of conference (including Hard & Soft(ware) hackathon, mini-game jam, labs, makers- and start-up- areas as well). The focus of the conference is Technology– in all its glory– both hardware and software, technical and creative. Tracks include web, mobile, big data, makers and creative.

The OpenTechSchool Zurich is scheduling its first workshop, Python for beginners, which is going to take place at the wonderful Colab (which, incidentally, rhymes nicely with our Berlin facilities, so that must be a good sign!) The workshop is going to be 4 hours on a Saturday, noon-ish, with an optional install party on the preceding Friday night.

We need you Python enthusiasts to help us with the coaching! So if you think you can help coaching Python please join the Meetup group and fill out the Doodle so we can quickly agree on a date. No need to be an expert, no matter how much you know about Python programming your knowledge and experience will be useful to a beginner!

HacKIDemia, OpenTechSchool and Toywheel are bringing the hackathon format of working together on technology in interactive workshops to the world of Kids in Berlin with their first Kids Hackathon on Sunday, April 28th 2013.

Do you have a child (6 to 15 years old) and you want them to learn the latest technologies hands on and by experimenting in interactive workshops? Bring them to our Kids Hackathon where they learn to use microcontrollers, crafts and programming to express themselves and their ideas in the areas of interactive storytelling, space, music, healthcare and body functions, environment and ocean.

As some of you probably already know, we’ve been supporting HacKIDemia, which took place on Easter Monday, April 1st, here in Berlin by promoting the event. We are happy to announce, that HacKIDemia and OpenTechSchool decided to take their collaboration to the next level and do a first, new event all together: the Hackathon for Kids, which will take at the end of April (target dates are 27th/28th of April) will consist of various full-day challenges and workshops kids hack on with their parents and qualified coaches. We are thinking about the Nasa-Send-Things-to-Space-Challenge and the famous TEDxYouthAustin-Makey-Makey-Sound-installation but also about more software involving topics like setting up Arduinos and sensors to track and visualise air conditions or Scratch-based Software-Challenges. We are already in talks with an amazing venue and have sponsors on board to help us with other stuff around.

What we need now are great ideas for workshops and coaches willing to host them with us. Therefore this is a call for coaches of all backgrounds and languages, interested in hacking with kids. If you are interested in coaching tech and making to kids, please quickly answer these few questions and join the organisational meetup on Wednesday, April 10th at Co.Up at which we will discuss what to do and how to get organised. And even if you don’t speak german or can’t make it to the prep meeting, please fill out the form, there are checkboxes for both of those.

OpenTechSchool has held many good coding workshops but not so many hardware-related ones. We would like to change that by starting with a very simple and beginner-friendly workshop about opening (mostly mobile) hardware. To do that, we are looking for coaches.

We at the OpenTechSchool are coming from the tech-industry and are tech-savvy people, who started this whole movement because we felt technology is tought wrong as it is done today. We never really thought further than tech until Sam made the great Video of us for his “Year of Open Source”-Project and raised said question in the corresponding blog post. In it Sams asks whether the way we organise ourself and our learning materials in combination with the very personal and including way of real-life events could be transfered to other topics and subjects. Sure, we saw the idea of the OpenStartupSchool here in Berlin (on which we are still waiting for anything to happen) but as this rather close to us and focusses on a similar audience, we really didn’t see this as going much further. Not until Sam brought up that this sounds like a great learning technique for learning languages.

You know that at OpenTechSchool we have always been supportive of women in tech, being glad that half of our learners are women, proud to have amazing female role models among our coaches and dedicated to building a safe learning environment where both women and men can feel welcome.

Through the Hive-Network we recently came together with Sebastian Seitz from the Technologie Stiftung Berlin (TSB). He is supervising the project “Make IT real” and one of the things they are organising there are so called “Student Labs” here in Berlin: a place set up to facilitate a whole class of pupils or students and make a half- or even full-day workshops dedicated to teach tech topics. And the OpenTechSchool would like to help with that.

During the preparation of the Summit of NewThinking we met Sam Muirhead, who pursues a very interesting project called “Year of Open Source”. For more than half a year everything Sam begins or renews, he forces himself to make it as open source as possible. From clothes or over travelling up to entertainment, everything as open source as possible but at least as “share-ish” as possible (think of car pooling or hitchicking instead of flying). He documents all his doing with blog articles and videos and may will put together a final documentation on his efforts at the end.

On thing he wanted to pursue this year was learning to code. So he was looking into open education concepts and - as he is also located in Berlin - interviewed some of the OTS Team members and put together this amazing video (thank you so very much) and made a great blog post about us.

Last Saturday the python coaches of Berlin met once again to discuss the upcoming learning materials and workshops for the next few weeks and months. There will be more material and though people already volunteered to join in writing, we want more coaches to participate.

Last month, Ben gave a talk on how OpenTechSchool uses GitHub to create and manage learning material in an efficient and open fashion at the Summit of Newthinking in Berlin. Since the recordings have been uploaded, we want to publish both the video as well as the presentation on this blog.

Much has happened since we created our first version of the website back in July: not only did we move to meetup.com to manage most of our events, gain new team members, and add plenty of learning materials, we also set up OpenTechSchool in another city - Stockholm! The website didn’t reflect any of those changes, though, so we decided to redo everything from the ground up. I am very proud to announce that “Project Nikolaus” officially took off and you can see the results online as of now. “Project Nikolaus” wasn’t only the redesign of a website, but is about much more than that, and I’d like to take the time to explain a few aspects of it to you in this blog post.

Arduino - a small micro controller conquers the world. And we want to help it. Not only because we’ve been asked a lot about hardware workshops for that device but also because we think it is just amazing what you can do with it. But we need help - help by experienced Arduino and hardware people, who want to share their passion with other by coaching. We need you!

Beginners: it’s time to get social! OpenTechSchool is proud to announce it’s first workshop for social coding. Learn how to share your code online, find interesting projects and connect with programmers across the world!

A few months back me and my pal Paul Nelligan started our little “Micro Hack Days”: Every once in a while, we took the Saturday afternoon to come and hack together in some public place. It was fun and productive, but quickly we realised it would be nice to have more people there to hack-a-long and chat with. So beginning of October we decided to institutionalize this a bit more and make a public meetup under the OpenTechSchool umbrella. Last Saturday we hosted the first “official” event and it was … splendid!

We have been very busy behind the scenes to create the most awesome month of OpenTechSchool yet: plenty of events this month and even more coming up or in the works. Also our very first event outside of Berlin and more about our expansion in this article…

Animations and visualisations are nice look at, but not that easy to produce, epecially when you are missing the math background. That’s why OpenTechSchool would love to host a workshop about math in visualisation and 3D. In order to do that, we need help!

Last week, our core team member Beatrice Martini landed in Stockholm. One of her missions in the Swedish capital: find out whether people are interested in starting a local OpenTechSchool Group there. Our experience with OTS in Berlin has been and is great and we’d like to take our learnings there as a blueprint on how to make the movement grow in other cities around the globe. And in Stockholm, after meeting so many programmers and tech lovers in the local tech and startup community who expressed great enthusiasm for the project, looks like there’s definitely a strong interest and will to join the movement! We already secured a venue and have a first idea of a calendar of workshops in October and November. What we need now, are more people from the local community joining and helping with organizing, coaching (as a start: JavaScript, Python? And more!), giving talks about technology for beginners and, most important, spreading the word! So if you are interested in what is going on with OpenTechSchool Stockholm, have ideas you want to share, want to help with organizing and coaching please sign up to our public mailing list below and drop us a line straight away. Note for the coaches: the learning material for these events has already been prepared and verified by the Berlin team – ready for you to coach in a snap! We want Stockholm to experience the awesomeness of this project, have only a limited time to make it happen (Beatrice will go back to Berlin in a few weeks) and we need all the help we can get to make the most of it. Thank you!

Last Saturday OpenTechSchool held the first workshop for Python beginners. Let’s look back at some of the highlights of the day. Thank you to the students and coaches that helped make this workshop a great success!

Wow, that was an intense and a very exciting week. When we first got offered the possibility to have a presence at Campus Party [link] we thought it would be a nice addition to their program to hold 2-3 workshops there. We were just in the planning state for our very first workshop and didn’t know where our journey would take us.

Alongside all of our hard work to bring you lots of interesting workshops at Campus Party, a dedicated team of Python coaches and OTS organizers have been busy planning a new workshop. On September 1st, you will have the chance to attend a four hour introduction to Python, starting at 14:00.

Our first Beginners Meetup went well, with around 50 participants joining us on August 8th at co.up. First up was Bea with a short intro into what OTS is & what we had envisioned for the (still evolving) learn & tell portion of the event.

OpenTechSchool held its first workshop, JS for Absolute Beginners, on July 21-22. Here is a look at the event from three perspectives: that of a participant, a coach, and an organizer. Thanks to everyone who made this event a giant success!

For the sake of catching up with each other in the ‘real world’ rather than the Internet, we have decided to meet biweekly for OpenTechSchool team breakfasts. We’ll be meeting at 8:30 every other Thursday at co.up. You’re invited to join us!

Berlin is a beautiful city in which you can lose yourself among many amazing tech events, meetings, and chances to exchange and improve your skills. It’s very easy for a developer to find other developers and create new projects or get some help with what they’re working on. But what about the beginners? Or what about the people who don’t know anything about a particular language they would really love to learn?

I’m very glad to announce that OpenTechSchool will be offering workshops during CampusParty. Yes, we will participate in this week-long tech event, taking place on Tempelhofer Feld in Berlin from August 21 to the 26th. With 10,000 participants, developers, and tech enthusiasts from all over Europe, and over 600 hours of content, workshops, hackathons, presentations, and who knows what else, it will be one of the biggest tech events this city has ever seen. Awesome, right?

Our core values

Openness to us means sharing, whether that be the coaches sharing their time and skills, or, over time, the learners sharing what they have gained with newcomers and becoming coaches themselves, as well as sharing their projects and progress with others. It also stands for our aim to provide the opportunity for coaches to pool their brainpower and create the workshop and curriculum themselves, rather than having a rigidly set way to teach or learn the material.

A mere 24 hours after the first tweet was sent about the July 21/22 JavaScript workshop, registration for the event has ended. We are very happy to have such a positive response and hope that following workshops will be open to more participants. You can help make this happen: no matter if you’ve never coached before, we are looking for people who know JS and want to give teaching a chance. We promise you will find it worthwhile.